Yesterday, I was having a conversation with my friend Doug Adams, who runs the Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes website. We were chatting on Messages, and discussing a possible iTunes AppleScript. He said he would email me later in the day, and, a few hours later, said that he had emailed me a link to the script. I didn’t get his email, and he ran some tests, and found that Apple’s iCloud email service was filtering his mail, apparently blocking “dougscripts,” which is part of his domain name.

So links to scripts, tips, and articles on my site can’t be used in iCloud mail messages or they will not be delivered.

This isn’t the first time I’d heard about Apple’s silent email filtering; they block messages with certain texts, but don’t bounce them, so the only way you know something has been blocked is if you check with your recipient and find they haven’t received a message.

While spam filtering is important, making arbitrary filters like this is wrong, and should not happen; I also wonder if it’s in violation of Apple’s terms of service. They said that, regarding email, you will not…

You acknowledge that Apple is not responsible or liable in any way for any Content provided by others and has no duty to pre-screen such Content.

There’s a serious problem when your emails may not be delivered and you are not notified. Imagine if Doug were applying for a job, sending a link to his website to show people his work. He’d assume the email went through, but would have no way of knowing that it didn’t. He might miss a deadline for paid work that he sent someone attached to an email, or he might simply not be able to tell a friend where they are to meet.

Apple should not be doing this. If they filter emails, they should send non-delivery notifications, with explanations of why the emails were not delivered. I hope Doug can sort this out, and I find it very surprising that something as simple as his domain name is being blocked.

I use a .mac email address occasionally, in part because it has push messaging, and that’s useful on my iOS devices. I may stop using it, however, as the inability to be certain my messages get delivered can be a problem for me as a professional who works almost exclusively via email.

I have finally won my month long battle with Apple, after our domain name was black listed. We are a medium size accountancy company in the UK with many customers who have apple email accounts, earlier this year we noticed all clients with Apple accounts were not receiving our email. The mail wasn’t going into their spam folder and we were not getting a bounce back. At first we had assumed our exchange server must be misconfigured in some way, after a thorough review we could see the issue was not with our setup so I then contacted Apple and went around in circles for weeks trying to prove the fault was not at our end. I eventually proved the fault was with apple when I had the eureka idea, to try emailing an apple account from a Hotmail account but include our domain name in the content of the email, sure enough this was also silently filtered out, with no bounce back. At this point apple had to except the fault was not with our mail server, a few days later apple resolved the issue and admitted that the domain had been black listed.

Our ski club (Ski Club of Manchester) runs a couple of mailing lists.
Apple email users don’t get any messages because posts contain the web site address http://www.scom.org.uk and unsubscribe links.
I found apple are discarding all messages with scom.org in the body or subject both to and from icloud.com and me.com addresses. Why?